Executive Editor for the Humanities

I seek books that develop a global humanism which reflects upon the limits of reductionism. My main areas of acquisition are philosophy and literary studies, though I make forays into other disciplines. I work on the assumption that cultures are undergoing a great shift, as they abandon a mode of thinking that quantifies and commodifies the world around us to the exclusion of spiritual values. Central to my list is the work of authors engaged in spiritual inquiry—Charles Taylor, John O’Malley, Robert Bellah, and many others. In philosophy, a main line of inquiry builds on the transcendental thinking of Emerson and Thoreau and threads through books by Hilary Putnam, Willard Quine, John McDowell, Jennifer Hornsby, Robert Brandom, Elizabeth Anscombe, Wilfred Sellars, Amartya Sen, Stanley Cavell, and Nancy Bauer. In literary and cultural studies, the books I sponsor extend the reach of our “new histories” of French, German, and American literature to include works by Lawrence Buell, Gish Jen, and Namwali Serpell, among others. My “angel of history” is Walter Benjamin, whose writings have inspired a fusion of history, politics, and the arts and sparked a revival of aesthetics.

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Now Available: The digital Loeb Classical Library (loebclassics.com) extends the founding mission of James Loeb with an interconnected, fully searchable, perpetually growing virtual library of all that is important in Greek and Latin literature.

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I want to take you back just over 2,400 years to the high Anatolian plain of central Turkey. It’s the year 404 BC; it’s Autumn; and it’s the dark hours of the night. Alcibiades, perhaps the most controversial Greek of his generation, is living in exile in a compound at Melissa—probably modern Afyonkarahisar—where strange rock formations erupt out of the rolling plain, near the fabled Royal Road that runs from Sardis in the west to Susa, capital of Persia’s Empire, in the east. For now, everyone inside is sleeping, but then something awakens them. Perhaps the barking of a dog. Or perhaps the acrid smell of burning creeping through the rooms, or the ever-louder crackling of fire as brown smoke pours in beneath the door, and through the cracks beside the doorposts. Here, from my b…